Hide Me Among the Graves

“Yes. I knew about … statues, from my days as curator of ancient statuary at the Museum of Napoli — some of them are not entirely lifeless. And I belonged to the Carbonari there, who also know more than a little about such things.”

Christina nodded, noting the black spot on his palm — he had often told the children that it was the mark of Carbonari membership.

“And then King Ferdinand outlawed the Carbonari, and I fled to Malta — but in ’22, when I was thirty-five, there was an earthquake, and I,” he said, scratching his palm, “sensed this little stone, north of me. A summoning compass, if you like! I sailed east of Sicily, past the Gulf of Taranto and Apuleia, many perils, all the way up the east coast of Italy to Venice, following the, the dream-song that led me to find him”—he nodded toward the tiny lone figure on the chessboard—“in the possession of an ignorant Austrian soldier.”

“… Led you to find him.” Not it, she thought.

He freed his hand to ruffle her brown hair. “Understand, child, I had at that point nothing to lose. The Pope had already excommunicated the Carbonari.”

Christina was momentarily glad that her sister, Maria, was living with another family as a governess, for Maria was virtuous and devout; and that her brother William was at work at the government tax office in Old Broad Street, for at the age of fifteen William was already a mocking skeptic.

Her brother Gabriel, though, who was off at Sass’s art academy in Bedford Square, would be intrigued. Christina wished he were here.

She nodded. “I understand.”

Hesitantly she reached her hand across toward the statue, giving her father time to tell her not to; but he made no objection, and her fingers closed around the cold thing.

Into her mind sprang the last line of the Milton sonnet: I also serve who only stand and wait. But that wasn’t right — it was supposed to be They, not I.

“You shouldn’t touch it,” he said, now that she already had.

She let go of it and drew her hand away. “Did you buy … it, from the Austrian soldier?”

Her father waved his hand in front of his spectacles. “In a sense, child.”

Christina nodded. “And this little stone man gave you a — a vision of Mother? Here in England?”

“That it did, though I’d never been to England, and I fell in love with her image — and set out to find her and marry her.” He nodded firmly. “And I did.”

Christina smiled. “Love at first second sight.”

But her father’s face sagged in renewed self-pity, the vertical lines around his mouth making him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Poor Frances Polidori! Working for wages in strangers’ houses now! It was a bad day for her when she became Frances Rossetti, married to this half-blind wretch who earns nothing anymore — whose only hope now is to … to move on, and join so many of our old friends!”

He cast a theatrical glance at the framed portrait on the far wall. It was a picture of his wife’s brother, John Polidori.

Christina recalled that her uncle had committed suicide in 1821—four years before her father found her mother. Her father couldn’t ever have met the man.

“Did you put it under your pillow, like a piece of wedding cake?” she asked, springing to her feet and crossing to the street-side window.

The rings hissed on the rod as she pulled the curtains aside, letting in afternoon sunlight reflected from the row of tan-colored houses on the other side of the Charlotte Street pavement. She glanced left and right through the glass, hoping her brother Gabriel might be coming home early from the art academy, as he often did, but she didn’t see his slim, striding figure among the weaving hedge of horses and carriage wheels.

From behind her came her father’s frail voice: “Turn off the gas, if you’re going to scorch us with sunlight! What pillow?”

She turned back to her father, and the sun glare from the windows across the street now made momentary dark webs in her vision, connecting everything in the parlor.

“In Malta,” she said. “Did you put the little man under your pillow?”

“Don’t touch it again, Christina,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t — I should have thrown him into the sea. Yes, under my pillow, on Midsummer’s Eve.”

Christina recalled that today was Midsummer’s Eve — June 23. Was that why her father had brought the thing downstairs and shown it to her?

He was shaking his head, and strands of his sparse white hair were falling over his glasses. “It’s a wicked trick, no good from it — you children, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades! Where did that come from? Eh?”

Christina smiled as she walked back across the old carpet to the table and stood on a chair to reach the stopcock at the base of the chandelier. When she and her brothers and sister had been children, they had played endless games of whist and Beggar My Neighbor in the nursery, and at some point they had each adopted one of the suits of cards: Gabriel was hearts; William, spades; Maria, clubs; and Christina was diamonds.

“I think several of us dreamed it,” she said, hopping back down to the floor, “and it was fun to have … secret identifications.”

“Not in a house with children!” muttered the old man. “And even now, you’re only fourteen! I’ve been a terrible father.”

Christina paused, staring at him. She and her siblings had read Maturin’s eerie Melmoth the Wanderer and The Arabian Nights, and their mother often read to them from the Bible. William would scoff, but William was at work.

“Just,” she said, “with it under your pillow? No … special rhyme to say?”

“Prayers, you should say! With a rosary under your pillow! Not what I did…”

“What did you do, Papa?” she asked softly. “Confess.” His mention of rosaries had reminded her that he was at least nominally Catholic, though her mother and her sister were devout Anglicans.

“Promise me you’ll destroy it when I’m gone — crush it and scatter the powder into the sea. Promise.”

Not destroy it now? she thought. “I promise.”

“I — God help me. I bled on it. I rubbed some of my blood on it, first. Promise! — but where would you children be, if I had not? Is it a sin to have sired the four of you? What would have become of Frances, as she was — a governess and still unmarried at twenty-six? Now she’s the wife of a professor of Italian at King’s College!”

A retired professor, thought Christina, with no pension. But, “Just so,” she said.

He had begun coughing piteously, and it probably wasn’t all for show — he did have bronchitis again.

“Stir up the fire, vivace mia,” he quavered.

Christina slid the fire screen aside and reached into the fireplace with the shovel and pushed the gray coals into a pile to make a bed for a handful of fresh lumps of coal from the iron basket on the hearth.

Then she heard her brother Gabriel’s boots tapping up the steps, and a moment later heard the hallway door unlatch and swing open. The air in the parlor shifted and abruptly seemed stuffy when Gabriel strode into the room with a few whirls of the outside summer breeze still at his back.

“Salve, buona sera!” he said with cautiously preemptive cheer, tossing a couple of books onto a chair by the door and shrugging out of his coat.

Christina knew he was apprehensive about having left school early — their father often complained that Gabriel was wasting the tuition money — but her brother’s first words had made her realize that she and her father had been speaking in English. Everyone in the family was fluent in both English and Italian, but old Gabriele nearly never spoke English in his home.

Her father closed his hand over the little statue and returned it to his pocket.

Christina glanced at the old man, and he very slightly shook his head. Do you mean stop speaking English now, she wondered, or stop talking about the statue?

Either way, her brother’s jarring entrance — he was riffling through the mail beside the empty chessboard now, looking very much the man of the house in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, though he was only two years older than Christina — had broken the morbid, secretive mood. Gabriel’s ostentatious youth, his clear blue eyes and his